Lisnr’s Audio-Beacon Technology Reaches Users Through Sound

Songs we listen to and movies we watch can now recognize us, allowing marketers to track our locations, send us messages and otherwise interact with our smartphones.

Lisnr Inc. Chief Executive Rodney Williams

Olivia Lane

Lisnr Inc., a startup with audio-beacon technology that enables those scenarios, just closed on a $3.5 million Series A round, the company’s founder and Chief Executive Rodney Williams told Venture Capital Dispatch.

Cincinnati-based Lisnr embeds tones, which are inaudible to the human ear, into digital media, as well as into speakers at live events such as sporting games. Its technology is also incorporated into various mobile apps. The apps, through the use of a smartphone’s microphone, tune into the tone and respond in the way Lisnr’s customers want to.

To help move beyond trials and into larger deployments, Lisnr raised the new funding. Boston-based Progress Ventures led the new investment in Lisnr, with participation from Jump Capital, CincyTech, Serra Ventures and Texas-based Mercury Fund.

The type of audio beacon technology from Lisnr is most similar to that of another startup, Sonic Notify Inc., which also received backing from Raptor Ventures as well as A-Grade Investments, Advancit Capital, AngelVision Investors, Digital Entertainment Ventures, Eniac Ventures and the Gorfaine/Schwartz Agency.

Mr. Williams, who was previously an executive at Procter & Gamble Co., working on social-media and digital-marketing campaigns, said Lisnr’s take on the business is to offer a platform technology that its business customers can use the way they want. The startup isn’t a consumer-facing business, he said. Lisnr can work without any additional hardware, as standard speakers can transmit its tones.

The company expects to have between $1 million and $2 million in revenue this year, up from about $500,000 in 2013, Mr. Williams said. The company charges its customers based on how many different types of tones the customer wants, what content it wants to trigger–a simple text message or a video, for example–and for how long it wants to run its campaign.

Its technology has been already embedded in about six million downloaded mobile applications, the CEO said. He hopes to end the year with 10 million to 20 million downloads.

A recent Sony campaign used Lisnr to create buzz for musician J. Cole in which fans could unlock and preview his new album simultaneously when they arrived at certain locations like Times Square in New York. Boomboxes in those locations were playing inaudible Lisnr beacons that triggered the music to stream to the listeners’ smartphones. As a result, Mr. Williams said, Sony generated preorders and popularity of J. Cole shot up on Twitter.

The company is targeting live events, such as sports games, as well as media, like producers of songs or movies. Lisnr is also developing analytics technology. This can give a song producer, for example, information on how often a song was played and through which app, for example. It could give a television channel information regarding how long the viewer was present during certain shows, for example.

Asked whether the company’s technology might elicit privacy concerns, Mr. Williams said that as long as the content that is triggered on smartphones is useful to consumers and isn’t intrusive, he expects many to welcome it. “I’m a sports guy…If I go use the bathroom, and before I get back I get a notification: ‘Hey, Rodney, here’s what you just missed.’ If you did that I’d want you to track everything I’m doing.”

The investment in Lisnr is one of the larger Series A rounds for a Midwest company, Mr. Williams said. It is especially rare for an advertising-technology startup to get funded in the region, he said.

“The customers and investors, the kind of individuals that understand what we are doing, are not in the Midwest,” he said. Mr. Williams had moved to Cincinnati earlier in his career for work at Procter & Gamble, where he was an executive working on digital and social-media marketing.

Although being based in the Midwest required Mr. Williams to travel around the country to find investors and customers, the region had many benefits, he said.

“We have some awesome talent for really cheap,” he said. The company raised $850,000 in a seed round in August 2012. “If we were in the Valley or in New York, we would’ve used $2 million to $3 million” to get to the same point, he said.

Comments (1 of 1)

This is a perfect example of subliminal advertising. This technology is going to disrupt your thought processes within your brain and distract your thinking. This is going to disrupt your focus. You will no longer be able to have private thoughts without someone else trying to invade your brain,and trick you into doing something outside of your scope. You will be assimilated, resistance is futile!

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